


mariner's compass

by doublelead



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Childhood Memories, Constellations, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Stars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 23:21:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9407378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublelead/pseuds/doublelead
Summary: “Looks like I found a new constellation,” he says in-between quiet giggles. His hand reaches out to lightly tap the tip of Gladiolus’ nose. He lets his fingers fall – a lingering ghost of a touch down the corner of his mouth, along his jawline.





	

“ _Cir_ _cinu_ _s_ ,” Noctis whispers, his breath just barely reaching the cotton walls surrounding him. His fingertips trace the little raised plastic bulbs, faint light seeping into his skin. The planisphere digs into his thighs as he shifts, eyes trailing the milkyway painted under fairy lights.

“ _Alpha circini._ ” A little ways away, a brush of the constellation toeing into the river’s surface. He turns his head, chin tucked behind his shoulders. A quiet inhale, in the backlight, powder blue falling off the tips of his hair. The universe opens up from under his socks, pillows and plush toys piled high to reach the furthest galaxies, blanketing him inside the bubble of space he lives in.

Gladiolus snores a little then, turning to his side. The spell doesn’t break, even when starlight dots Gladiolus’ face, his hand curling behind Iris’ head as he pulls her closer to his chest.

Magic is a pillow fort with the night sky reflecting off its borders, Noctis standing at the entrance.

 

\--------

 

A satellite’s light blinks, in the fountain’s surface. Noctis watches the sky as he gently paddles his feet. Rhythmic rippling, drops straining his sleep shorts. He raises a leg, points a toe, stretches and hopes to reach a star. Water coils cold around his ankles, trickling in rivulets down his calf.

The underside of his knee feels cold. He hides a sneeze behind a sleeved-covered palm, his body curling, just the slightest bit, into himself.

When he breathes again, his eyes open to find the usual dark sky, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a warm drink pressed to his hip on the fountain’s edge.

“ _Pyxis Nautica,”_ Ignis softly says, his gaze locked upwards and away from him. He laces his fingers behind his back, looking wistful. “The mariner’s compass.”

Noctis follows his gaze, to the lone light that’s the satellite and laughs, a little dry. “You can’t pull that on me anymore, Ignis. You can’t actually see stars from here.”

“Right, right,” he chuckles. “The young prince is fourteen now, clearly too old for the romance of fairy tales.”

“I didn’t say that.” Noctis continues to splash his feet, distorting the reflected sky, the dim lanterns surrounding the garden. The moon bobs aimlessly, floating in the far-off corner nearly untouched.

“I’m glad.” Ignis’ midnight blue sleeves fill the corners of his sight, his elbows a barely-there weight atop Noctis’ shoulders. It’s gone, just as quick – Noctis no longer boxed in in warmth as an almost paper-light weight falls on to his lap. “Our gift isn’t completely useless, then.”

A piece of scrap paper is wedged between the discs of the planisphere. He picks it up gingerly, smiles at the three distinct handwriting scrawled across the surface, all in different colours. He recognises Iris’ messy script in her favourite violet felt-tip marker, then Gladiolus’ in indigo – his message as boisterous as he is, barely leaving enough space for the others’.

Ignis’ is written in warm orange, a perfect echo of the smile Noctis sees when he looks up.

“Happy birthday, Noct.”

 

\--------

 

He didn’t expect the trail of round tap lamps from his bedroom door to a pillow fort by his window. Gladiolus leads him by the hand, the both of them tiptoeing under the dim glow in their slippers, waltzing across the plush carpet. Iris pokes her head out from behind a curtain of blankets, greeting him with a bright sunshine smile. She starts to ramble, about how she and Gladiolus worked all day to have this done, how she sent Ignis to distract him all day and that’s why he isn’t here with them. _‘Keeping an eye on Noct is quite the taxing task,_ _you see,_ _’_ she had said, miming a push of invisible glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“But, yeah! I was thinking about how we can’t really see the stars, right?” she continues, as Gladiolus bows deep, letting him enter the fort first, a playful jab at their social positions. “So Oniichan and I thought this would do the trick!”

Noctis finds his planisphere nestled between pillows, the upper discs set to show the a piece of the sky where Pyxis lies. Right on the wall opposite him, was the milkyway, the fairy lights representing Pyxis skirting the speckled dusting of glow-in-the-dark ink.

“What do you think, Highness?” Gladiolus says in murmurs, from somewhere beside him. Noctis can hear the proud grin in his voice. “Pretty cool, right? I haven’t painted in a long time, so I was actually kind of worried about how it’ll turn out.”

The room darkens, with the entrance fluttering closed at their feet. Noctis turns back to Gladiolus and stops. His breath hitches, a minute pause. The first tumbles of air slips by, light whispered gasps fill the air. He laughs, loose and open, a finger pointed outwards, an arm clutched around his stomach. Splashes of light marks Gladiolus’ skin – scattered across his cheek like freckles, dotting his fingers and up his wrist.

“Looks like I found a new constellation,” he says in-between quiet giggles. His hand reaches out to lightly tap the tip of Gladiolus’ nose. He lets his fingers fall – a lingering ghost of a touch down the corner of his mouth, along his jawline.

\--------

 

Ignis lets him slack off, pointedly looking at him whilegoing through his lecture on today’s reading. He doesn’t stop, though – continues reading with practised poise as he pretends that Noctis is actually paying attention. He recites the constellations of the southern sky, the latitudes in which they could be seen, the astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille who first defined Circinus.

Graphite smears the margins of Noctis’ book. A rough stroke for every two words, idle and aimless. The lines start to take shape: short staggered staccatos that make up a pair of thick eyebrows, deep, dark shaded eyes, a prominent nose. Noctis wasn’t much of an artist, but he lets a smile seep and set, his cheeks warm and aching.

He always thought of Gladiolus as Circinus, the draftsman’s compass. A point of a distance away, always within arm’s reach. Orbiting him like a satellite. A constant companion and a reliable presence. It’s fitting when his hands finds a way to draw the comparison, the flicks of Gladiolus’ hair underlining the constellation’s name in pencil. His small chuckle is drowned out, by a tug of his lips he tries to wipe away on his arm, his forehead now leaning against the open page.

 **Circinus** (ˈsɜːsɪnəs)  
_Latin genitive_ Circini (ˈsɜːsɪˌnaɪ)

A faint constellation close to Centaurus and the Southern Cross, representing the drafting tool for drawing circles.

 

\--------

 

“When you can’t focus, I focus for you.”

_He was wrong._

Sweat-blurred vision, Gladiolus’ hand outstretched towards him.

_He’d always been wrong._

“Sorry, but I had to get it out. Come on.”

Gladiolus’ hand curls around his, catching him when his fingers slip through the gaps. He squeezes, just enough for Noctis to look up – at Gladiolus through the dark wisps of his hair falling onto his face.

“Remember. Don’t rush ahead on your own.”

_He wasn’t Circinus at all._

Noctis squeezes back, lets himself be pulled along. His heartbeat refuses to calm, his blood pulses deafeningly in his ears. He lets out a quiet, shaky exhale, focuses his sight on their feet against hard ground – the back of Gladiolus’ knee between blinks, his shoelaces bouncing with every step.

 

\--------

 

“It’s kind of silly that we used to wish on satellites when stars actually exist,” Prompto says reaching out for the sky above him. He makes for a swift grab the of the air by his palm, pretends to catch a star. Holding his hands to his chest, he sighs, “I’ll never get used to this.”

“It’s silly that I had to learn astronomy when I couldn’t even see them,” Noctis scoffs, imagines himself glaring at the back of Ignis’ head. He’s far too bone tired to move, lies lifelessly on the ground next to Prompto, connects the stars with nonsensical lines as a silent protest against the lessons he had when he was a child.

“Naw, don’t say that,” he hears Gladiolus say. “You were obsessed with space back then.”

“We got you a telescope and everything, too,” Ignis helpfully supplies from the portable stove.

“Oh, right. I had one.”

He gets a soft tap of Gladiolus’ shoe to his head, and then Gladiolus squatting down to pinch his nose. “Ungrateful brat,” he says, fond.

His lungs loses a battle of willpower and he scrambles onto his stomach with a sharp pant and a harsher smack to Gladiolus’ hand. He glares at him, through heaves of breaths. An insult lies on the tip of his tongue, fizzles out as his vision refocuses.

_Pyxis Nautica._

Lips parted, hair mussed, he looks behind Gladiolus’ curious stare to the rough line of stars that ends with Beta Pyxidis at the tail end. He remembers a pillow hugged to his chest, Gladiolus’ finger in his periphery drawing shapes along the milkyway. _‘That’s the mariner’s compass,’_ Gladiolus had said then, muffled behind Noctis’ own sleepy yawns. _‘_ _And t_ _hat there is Alpha Pyxidis, it burns_ _about_ _twenty-thousand times brighter than the sun.’_

“ _You know_ ,” Noctis finds himself say. “I think Alpha Pyxidis is my favourite star.”

His face tints red, at the words left to hang between them. Words like confessions, the implications they held.

‘ _You’re my compass,’_ is what he wanted to say instead, perhaps, swallowed under layers of embarrassment.

 

\--------

 

__

“I worked hard on that one,” Gladiolus’ voice lulls him to sleep. “Took special care drawing it and all.”

__

“’Cause it’s the milkyway?” Noctis asks, his voice trailing away to quiet murmurs.

__

“Nah,” Gladiolus laughs, turning on to his stomach, leaning his cheek on an arm slung across the blanketed floor. “I just really like Pyxis, I guess. A compass that guides lost sailors at sea. It’s kind of poetic.”

__

“Isn’t this a gift for me?” Noctis snorts. “Why are you putting extra effort on your favourite?”

__

“What was your favourite again? Circinus?”

__

Noctis doesn’t think he ever got the chance to answer. His breathing turns steady, washed by the waves rocking his boat’s hull. His fingers skitter the waterline in his dreams, carrying a scoop of the galaxy in his hands, watching Gladiolus’ palms reflected through the surface drawing closer, closer, until he feels warmth holding him, a gentle pressure on the back of his thumbs. 

__


End file.
